Tuesday Foto Funnies

It has been brought to my attention by my luncheon date today that I've been a blogging slacker of late. When the Las Vegas Weekly comes out this week, you'll find out why my mind has been otherwise engaged, but nonetheless I decided I ought to feed the masses, such as they are, with some of those entertaining images I love to collect.

WTF is that atop? Well, in early March, I was hired by a trade publication to cover the Fun Expo, a big confab for the amusement park and family entertainment center -- "FEC" in the lingo -- industry. And one of the seminars I covered was all about throwing better birthday parties. One idea was a game where two teams stuff balloons inside the oversized shirts of the competitors. Here's the other lady:


And here's the whole room learning the importance of mascots and gettin' jiggy wit it:


Not your typical convention, huh? That's where, by the way, I learned of the automated cotton candy machine that made it into this March 26 version of this blog feature.

I had to get directions for David McKee of LVA's Stiffs & Georges blog to come subsitute host for Miles on The Strip a few weeks back. When I went to Google Maps for the LVRocks.Com studio, I saw this:


That little jog that re-aligns Maryland Parkway is called South Rue 13. Ooh la la, huh? How fancy for a run-down area with a truly gross 7 Eleven! I was sure that it was some sort of misprint, but there's also a Rue 13 street sign, too.

Near Rue 13, by the by, I spotted this inventive deployment of Strip junk:


Speaking of Blogger McKee, he's been busy noting that Harrah's Buffet of Buffets deal, at first $29.99, is now $39.99. Some believe Harrah's always planned to jack up the price, but this...


...proves otherwise. You may recall from magician Nathan Burton's appearance on The Strip, a wrap like that costs $25,000 or more. So for the foreseeable future, it seems, Harrah's will have a knowingly out-of-date or misleading billboard on Bally's. Or maybe someone can get out there with a bucket of red paint and fix that "2"? I mean, yeah, it'd ruin the view from a couple of rooms, but they're not selling out anyway, right?

Here's a Google alert I really wish my parents hadn't received:

I stopped in on Harrah's comic-magician Mac King's 10th anniversary-on-the-Strip party on Sunday, as I Tweeted. He's the homespun guy with Coke-bottle glasses who wears plaid suits, so I guess it makes sense that this appears in his living room:

That's Mac. He's funny. He has a syndicated Sunday comic, but the R-J cut their Sunday comics pages to four pages recently and decided the only Vegas-originating cartoon of the lot had to go. Way to support the hometown hero, Shermy!

It was a nice shindig with all the usual. You know, a little person dudded up like Col. Sanders passing out KFC...

...and the likes of Penn Jillette, Rita Rudner, Vinnie Favorito and other fellow Harrahite stars chilling by the blow-up flume:

It's tricky business letting hoards of people into your home, but this works:

On another note, given all my fascination with the taxi life lately, I spotted this and realized that cabbies clearly don't view the Las Vegas Monofail as competition anymore:

Remember how I dropped in on Turnberry Towers a couple weeks ago for a blog post? Well, this is what the lobby looks like...


...and this is what the inside of the elevator I took looked like:


Ain't that fancy?

My two favorite license plates lately:

And finally, when I'm done with big projects or long blog posts, I play a little Scrabble on ISC.ro. And look at what bingo (Scrabble lingo for using all your letters) I got last week:


That enough for ya, Amy? Well, is it? Huh? OK. Time to get get some real bylines now!

Pictorial: Taxi Tunnels!

Back in December 2008 when Steve Wynn walked me through the soon-to-open Encore Las Vegas, he made an off-handed remark about how the taxi staging areas at his resorts are decorated to entertain cabbies. It was a little thing and, while I made a mental note to follow up, I never did.

One listener who was fascinated by that notion was Diane Taylor, a writer and weekly contributor to the blog at Living-Las-Vegas.Com. Taylor was the one who won the KNPR auction in February and donated $370 for lunch with me and Miles. Wynn Las Vegas donated the lunch to KNPR, so today Miles and I honored her donation with a terrific visit at Society Encore with her and her husband.

Diane had made one extra request. She wanted to know if the Wynn would show us the taxi tunnels. And so I asked the PR folks and, sure enough, they were happy to oblige.

First, we went down into the Encore tunnel. That's where that sign above leads to. It's a two-lane, 15-car length area with reddish orange walls adorned with flat-screen TVs tuned to ESPN.


Along the walls, too, were these murals. All of them involved drawings of sexy ladies and some sort of subterranean (as opposed to subliminal, natch) message about something related to the resort. For instance, this one...


...features the blonde there saying to nobody in particular: "Botero restaurant features two of famed Columbian artist Fernando Botero's sculptures and three of his paintings."

This one's fun, too:


It's a run-of-the-mill pajama party, see, and the redhead who happened to show up in a French maid outfit and seems to have a duster protruding from her mouth, says, "The high rollers can be found in the private Sky Casino, which is located at the top floor of Encore." Naturally, then, the only reasonable reply from the blonde trying to make the blood rush to her head is, "Did you know that our largest suite is 5,800 square feet and includes three bedrooms, an elevator and butler service?"

I did, actually.

This one took two frames to shoot:


This time, it's a lineup of cocktail waitresses. The bubble on the right says, "It's interesting to know that Mrs. Wynn directs the designs of all staff attire" and the lady to her left asked, "Did you know Mr. Wynn began his career in 1967 as part-owner, slot manager and assistant credit manager of the Frontier hotel?" That's fun, but wouldn't it have been even better if she had said, "Did you know that Mr. Wynn once called the Frontier Hotel the single biggest toilet in Las Vegas?"

Meanwhile, at the pool...


...one woman says, "Inspired by the French Riviera, the pools at Encore are at the heart of the activity" while the ladies to the far right are marveling, "The restaurant Wazuzu features a crystal dragon made of 90,000 crystals and 2,400 flickering lights."

There's also a restroom down there as well as signs indicating that the hotel holds a weekly NFL contest where taxi drivers who pick winning teams win stuff.

Obviously, the point here is to give cabbies something fun to look at and perhaps fill their heads with some good selling points while they wait to pick up passengers. Wynn started the taxi tunnel idea with Bellagio because he didn't like the way that the line of taxis looked at Mirage and Treasure Island.

LVCabChronicles, a Vegas taxi driver who blogs and Tweets about the trade, says that Paris, Riviera and Aria also have tunnels. He says cabbies are generally pleased with the Wynn folks and that "there is no question Mr. Wynn cares about the cabbies," but he also noted when I asked about the downsides:

"They are tunnels. You can get trapped in there, for sure. If business is slow and you commit to that tunnel, you can be in there a while. If a regular calls, I can't get them, I'm stuck. If my shift is over, I'm stuck. Plus, Wynn's driveway in general is way too small for the amount traffic coming and going, which lead to many cabbies hating that place at first. ... Worth noting: multiple companies forbid drivers from pick up at these properties when it rains. It gets very very slick in those tunnels."

Noted. And speaking of the Wynn tunnel, here we go.


The Wynn Las Vegas tunnel is lined with images of race cars. It's not quite the buxom babes spouting sweet somethings about the resort, but whatever. Here are some more shots:


I can sure see how that could get claustrophobic. There is, too, a unisex bathroom down here. LVCabChronicles said the vast majority of taxi stands at Vegas resorts don't have restrooms easily accessible to drivers. None of the other taxi waiting areas, he wrote, are decorated at all.

He also had praise for Bellagio, which "has a nice setup with a picnic table and vending machines and the restroom for drivers. They also have a dry-erase board that indicates the exact number of check ins/outs at that hotel that week which can be useful for drivers."

Hey! That could be useful to nosy journalists, too! Just saying!

Anyhow, that was a fun look-see at something most people don't ever think about or get to view. The Wynn fellow who drove us took us through the underground valet area of the hotel and we passed this:


That's the maintenance and storage area for the Ferraris that are sold at the resort.

Finally, since everyone's so curious, here's a shot of the new Switch Beach Club and Surrender Nightclub being built where Encore's west valet used to be. I was intrigued by the bridge built from Wynn self-park's second level because I wonder if that's going to be a faster way just to get to Encore from that garage without having to walk all the way around the resort.


But mostly, I wondered: What happened to the taxi tunnel for that valet stand?